Thursday, September 11, 2014

For
the unfamiliar, a “reveal” in screenwriting parlance is the placement of key,
revelatory information in a story. Most times, the last reveal is the most
important revelation of all.

FADE IN:

INT. AUDITORIUM -
LATER

McKee scribbles a
diagram onto a transparency in

an overhead projector. It's
some kind of compli-

cated time-line with act-breaks and corresponding

page numbers indicated. The audience members take

copious notes. Kaufman sweats.

KAUFMAN (V.O.)

It is my weakness, my ultimate lack

of conviction that brings me here.

Easy answers. Rules to short-cut

yourself to success. And here I am,

because my jaunt into the abyss

brought me nothing. Well, isn't

that the risk one takes for

attempting something new. I should

leave here right now. I'll start

over --

(starts to rise)

I need to face this project head on

and --

MCKEE

... and God help you if you use voice-

over in your work, my friends.

Kaufman looks up,
startled. McKee seems to be

watching him.

MCKEE (CONT'D)

God help you! It's flaccid, sloppy

writing. Any idiot can write voice-

over narration to explain the

thoughts of a character.
You must

present the internal conflicts of

your character in action.

Kaufman looks
around at people scribbling in note-

books."Flaccid..."
writes the guy on one side of

him."Any idiot..."
writes the guy on the other side.

DISSOLVE TO:

INT. AUDITORIUM -
MORNING

Kaufman,
bleary-eyed, sits in the back. McKee paces.

MCKEE

Anyone else?

Kaufman timidly
raises his hand.

MCKEE (cont'd)

Yes?

KAUFMAN

What if a writer is attempting

to create a story where nothing

much happens, where people don't

change, they don't have any

epiphanies. They struggle and

are frustrated and nothing is

resolved. More a reflection of

the real world --

MCKEE

The real world? The real fucking

world? First of all, if you write

a screenplay without conflict or

crisis, you'll bore your audience

to tears. Secondly: Nothing happens

in the world? Are you out of your

fucking mind? People are murdered

every day! There's genocide and

war and corruption! Every fucking

day somewhere in the world somebody

sacrifices his life to save someone

else! Every fucking day someone

somewhere makes a conscious deci-

sion to destroy someone else!

People find love! People lose it,

for Christ's sake! A child watches

her mother beaten to death on the

steps of a church! Someone goes

hungry! Somebody else betrays his

best friend for a woman! If you

can't find that stuff in life,

then you, my friend, don't know

much about life! And why the fuck

are you taking up my precious two

hours with your movie? I don't

have any use for it! I don't have

any bloody use for it!

KAUFMAN

Okay, thanks.

EXT. NYC STREET -
NIGHT

The last of the
students are filing out. Kaufman

waits, leaning against the
building. McKee emer-

ges, carrying his brown leather bag.
A shaky,

tired Kaufman approaches him.

KAUFMAN

Mr. McKee?

MCKEE

Yes?

KAUFMAN

I'm the guy you yelled at this

morning.

MCKEE

(trying to recall)

I need more.

KAUFMAN

I was the one who thought things

didn't happen in life.

MCKEE

Oh, right, okay. Nice to see you.

KAUFMAN

I need to talk.

MCKEE

I'm sorry. I can't talk to

writers about material I haven't

read.

KAUFMAN

Mr. McKee, my even standing here

is very scary.
I don't meet people

well. But what you said this morning

shook me to the bone. What you said

was bigger than my screenwriting

choices. It's about my choices as a

human being. Please.

McKee hesitates for
a moment, then reaches out

and puts his arm around Kaufman.

MCKEE

I
could use a drink, my friend.

DISSOLVE
TO:

INT. BAR - NIGHT

Kaufman and McKee
sit at a table with beers.

Kaufman reads from his copy of
The Orchid Thief.

KAUFMAN

... all the way to the road.

Kaufman closes the
book. There's a pause.

MCKEE

Then what happens?

KAUFMAN

That's the end of the book. I

wanted to present it simply,

without big character arcs or

sensationalizing the story. I

wanted to show flowers as God's

miracles. I wanted to show that

Orlean never saw the blooming

ghost orchid. It's about disap-

pointment.

MCKEE

(disappointed)

I see.

(beat)

That's not a movie. Maybe you've

got two acts.

KAUFMAN

(pause)

I've got pages of false starts

and wrong approaches. I'm way past

my deadline. I can't go back.

McKee sips his
beer, eyes Kaufman.

MCKEE (cont'd)

Tell you a secret. The last act

makes the film. You can have an

uninvolving, tedious movie, but

wow them at the end, and you've

got a hit. Find an ending. But

don't cheat! Don't you dare bring

in a deus ex machina. Your char-

acters must change and the change

must must come from them. Do that

and you'll be fine.

Tears form in
Kaufman's eyes.

KAUFMAN

You promise?

McKee smiles.
Kaufman hugs him. McKee recog-

nizes his bulk.

MCKEE

You've taken my course before?

KAUFMAN

My brother did. My twin brother

Donald. He's the one who got me

to come.

MCKEE

Twin screenwriters. Julius and

Philip Epstein, who wrote Casablanca

were twins.

KAUFMAN

You mentioned that in class.

MCKEE

One of the finest screenplays ever

written.

---From Adaptation by Charlie Kaufman

Woulda... Coulda... Shoulda...

Can...how... and, should... someone teach writing, and, specifically for this
article, screenwriting? There are no
shortages, neither of interested and willing students, nor of interested and
willing “teachers.” Colleges and Universities make six-figure money selling the
promise that six-figure money (and more!) can be made writing for the movies.
Gurus do the same, traveling the world with stacks of what some say are bottles
of snake oil disguised as books, and proceed to recite their tomes to their
salivating proto-scribes in vast auditoriums before selling them the very same
information in those very same books. Eminent professionals such as John Cleese
and William Goldman endorse them. And, yes, other professionals deride them. Ah,
the Yin and Yang of uncertainty stokes the conflict providing the drama
paralleling the writer’s stock-in-trade.

So, it is clear, someone can, at least, try to
teach writing. And, judging by the testimonials out there, many believe they
have, indeed, been taught. It’s certainly true that many, many graduates of the major University programs have gone on to the
highest ranks of Hollywood screenwriting, garnering both recognition and
awards, not to mention careers, in the process. That, by itself, may be an
answer to that third question of whether screenwriting should be taught. But critics will remind us that the legions of
students so outnumber the dozens of successes that it really amounts to an
exploitation by those institutions of higher learning of an unrealistic and
ultimately damaging fantasy. The truth, they might argue, is that those dozens
of successful writers’ own innate talent was responsible for their successes.

I think that the “truth” is somewhere in between,
somewhere in the middle. I think those successful, “trained,” screenwriters
benefited from both their education and their talent. Both were essential to their successes. Their
education put them in the right
places, at the right times, with the right stuff to offer. And their talent
made their stuff “right” and saw to it that, once they were through those
studio gates, they could continue to earn enough to pay off those student loans
and maybe put something down on one of those homes in the hills “above all the
lights.”

Elsewhere I have written:

The
popular view of books on writing, and in particular, screenwriting, is that
they’re bad for writers as they are seen to erect walls and impose rules:

"They
are good for getting started but have limited value. But you have to learn the
rules before you can start to break them. The danger of these books…is that
studios and writers end up making the same movie over and over again, which is
[one] reason why Hollywood movies are predictable and boring."

While
one might choose to view such books that way, I don’t. If one is offered
something, one is not obligated to accept. Who among us has never learned
something from a book or a class? The danger of such views (closing off to new
ideas) is that studios and writers might end up making the same movie over and
over again. Books are not the reason movies fail to work, studios and writers
are.

So, books
on writing are better viewed as voices in a conversation. The ideas offered may
not help in one case. But they may in another. Better still, they may in yours.

I love
movies. No, scratch that. I love good
movies. The problem is, every time I walk among the video racks, or scan the
online titles, they’re almost as scarce as that proverbial “honest man.” There
are a lot of reasons for this, and many of them have nothing to do with the
ideas from which they started. When a story-premise has gone through 37 drafts,
22 different writers, 5 directors, 3 studios, the setting changed from ancient
Egypt to an Eskimo village on Tahiti during nuclear winter in a globally-warmed
future, and the hero was supposed to be Will Smith but has now become the 3rd
studio head’s special friend. What can one expect? Good movies aren’t made
overnight, after all. But all this only serves to fire me up all the more when
a good one comes along. And it all starts with the script. So, to paraphrase
Woody Allen’s observation about life, movies are full of misery, loneliness,
and suffering. And they’re all over much too soon... some of them, anyway.

Books
about screenwriting cover virtually all aspects of the art. They run the gamut
from how to format your writing to fit industry standards to how to make it
saleable; from how to write independent films to how to write for Hollywood;
from how to overcome writer’s block to how to negotiate your first contract;
from how to live as a screenwriter to how to survive as a screenwriter. They
tell you how to get an agent, how to get a manager, and then how to get a
lawyer. It seems every aspect of the working screenwriting life is examined,
dissected, challenged, revised, overturned, and definitively established...
finally... for once and for all.

But are
they? There are a lot of screenwriters out there. Comedians used to joke about
having dinner in L.A. served by a waiter with a script under his arm. Now there
are “waiters” bearing scripts in every city and town of the developed world! I
can remember the great screenwriter, William Goldman, writing in his book, Adventures
in the Screen Trade, that when he had to find out in a hurry how to write a
script—he already had a deal to write one!—he ran all over Manhattan one
afternoon looking for a book and found only one, written years earlier! When I
first went looking, there were still only, perhaps, three.

There
are a lot of folks that say you can’t really teach writing. Oh, you can teach
the mechanics of writing, how it works and where to put what. But how to teach
how to write words people will pay to read, pay to produce for a market? “Aye,
there’s the rub.” So, at first glance, I tend to go with the naysayers. Books
that profess to teach anyone how to write for sale are probably misguided. “You
can’t teach talent,” the old saw goes. At best, they say, you can only help the
talent already there improve itself.

But, for
the sake of argument, let’s question those naysayers. What does “teaching
writing” mean? Certainly it doesn’t argue that we can’t teach someone how to
codify their thoughts through language into written text. Schools have an
excellent record of doing just that. Nearly anyone who can read is capable of writing.
So, maybe what these critics of ours are saying is that we can’t teach people
how to create content. But, no, even grade-schoolers are able to create enough
content in their essays to get to the next grade. So, then maybe our
curmudgeons are complaining that we can’t teach how to generate content worthy
of a market for it, i.e., good
content. While I will admit that we probably can’t teach someone which choices
to make within a pre-existing assembly of potential content, I will also argue
that we can get darn close. Education and life start us off, and writers we
admire and emulate carry us forward. Development of a viewpoint takes us
further still. So, what’s missing? Maybe the most elusive element of all: our creativity. And note, I say “our,” creativity.
It’s within every last one of us. All we have to do is to learn how to access
it, how to use it.

It’s the
position of this article that teachers of writing can offer many pathways upon
which to find good material, worthy content for those portfolios. Creativity,
however, is a beast. Amorphous and unreliable, it comes and goes, seemingly on
its own schedule, offering us a mixed bag even on good days. Why is that? I
submit it’s because we don’t understand how to access it. If we could tap into
it regularly and consistently we could be more assured of results. And with more
results, odds are there will be more “good” results.

The
observant reader has, by now, noticed that I’ve written a book on how to do
this, and it’s offered over on the right. I’m no guru, and any success readers
here may eventually have will be due solely to them: what, how, and when they do whatever it is that
achieves it. I believe that talent alone
won’t be responsible; nor, will, by
itself, education: not teachers, not books. Success will come, if and when
it does, from the whole package:
being in “the right places, at the right times, with the right stuff.” That book just offers some
new pieces to a solution.

Anyone
still reading this already has the necessary pieces of the creative part: first
and foremost: interest; but then, a
point of view, a facility with words, a belief they can write, and desire to
make it into a life. That makes improving
their inborn writing talent possible. This article isn’t about teaching someone
how to become creative. As I’ve said,
we’re all creative. Some just use it
better (or more often) than others. The
answer is to find and apply one’s own innate storytelling creativity. It’s
about getting more consistent in using one’s creative muscles every time they’re
needed, rather than casting about anew each time, unsure even of how to find the
muse.

I’ll
make no excuses for my position on all this. I believe that while creativity
can’t exactly be taught, it can be mined. And the motherlode is close, just around the corner... in the... bathroom... where the mirror is. #

FADE OUT.

Lee A. MatthiasQuotes of the Post:"Colleges and Universities make six-figure money selling the promise that six-figure money (and more!) can be made writing for the movies. Gurus do the same, traveling the world with stacks of what some say are bottles of snake oil disguised as books, and proceed to recite their tomes to their salivating proto-scribes in vast auditoriums before selling them the very same information in those very same books.""While I will admit that we probably can’t teach someone which choices to make within a pre-existing assembly of potential content, I will also argue that we can get darn close. Education and life start us off, and writers we admire and emulate carry us forward. Development of a viewpoint takes us further still. So, what’s missing? Maybe the most elusive element of all: our creativity. And note, I say “our,” creativity. It’s within every last one of us. All we have to do is to learn how to access it, how to use it."

Screenwriters and storytellers have been looking for deeper insight to their craft for years. Nothing truly new has been written in decades... until now. "Lateral Thinking" is a process for generating creative solutions to real-world problems. Coined by author and business consultant, Edward de Bono, it has helped the left-brain worlds of business and government to revolutionize, achieving unheard-of success. Lee Matthias returns this concept to its origins, the right-brain world of creative expression. Not another "how-to" on writing for Hollywood, this book decodes the creative process itself, applying it to storytelling in general and screenwriting in particular. LATERAL SCREENWRITING is packed with ideas, examples, stories, and the genius of the world's greatest filmmakers. Rather than re-hashing a thousand other works on the "how" of screenwriting, this book helps writers find their best ideas toward writing the greatest movies never-yet-made.

The theft of an unusual pocket-watch brings famed magician, Harry Houdini, together with the world's foremost consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes. When it leads to the appearance of a mysterious locked strong-box, it becomes a case that rocks the British Empire to its core.

A period feast, filled with luminaries of the era, bursting with the raucous energy of a time when the world was throwing off the romanticism of the Victorian Age for the power and dangerous potential of science, new philosophies, and the machine.

Sherlock Holmes is at his peak. The brash, young Houdini challenges all who stand in his way. And Watson, Holmes's chronicler and friend, returns us to a time when the gas was always lit, the Persian slipper always filled with shag, and the game was, once again, and at long last... afoot.

Kobo E-Book Coupons!!!

Aisle Seat Books

I've just published three "novels" of my screenplays, THE JUPE,FOE, and THE SLEEP OF REASON. These are part of a new effort to put the best new un-produced screenplays before you as movie-length novels. Now you can "read a movie" in about the same amount of time as it would take to see the film. The publisher is Aisle Seat Books. Check them out!

FOE

In a near-future world shattered by an alien invasion, a lone Special Ops soldier, unaware that he's the key to victory, stumbles on a group of disabled military vets holding their abandoned VA Hospital as the invaders lay siege.

THE SLEEP OF REASON

After his bride disappears on their European honeymoon, Richard Renfield traces her to a castle ruin in the Carpathian mountains, and confronts its undead inhabitants, determined to restore her to life and bring her home. An apocalyptic war of Good versus Evil.

BlogCatalog

About Me

I am a writer with four published novels, others on the way, a nonfiction book, several screenplays written and in development. During and after college, I worked as a theater projectionist and manager, in public relations, and as a literary agent selling to publishers and producers. Two heads are better than one, so I keep a human skull on my desk for inspiration (and a second opinion--FWIW, he's dead-on). I currently work as a computer network administrator in government. I'm married and the father of two daughters.
“I’m a computer professional: I don’t lie, I manage information.”
Get in touch: LateralTao ( followed by the encircled "a" symbol, followed by the 5-letter name for the Google mail client, and then the period symbol followed by the usual 3-letter start to "communication") Now THAT oughta confuse the spambots out there.